{"id":73795,"date":"2014-07-10T18:23:26","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T22:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=73795"},"modified":"2014-07-10T22:17:19","modified_gmt":"2014-07-11T02:17:19","slug":"real-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Real Talk"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fPhHkJKue2g?rel=0\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p>Was the community you grew up in pleased about your career?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">MUNRO<\/p>\n<p>It was known there had been stories published here and there, but my writing wasn\u2019t fancy. It didn\u2019t go over well in my hometown. The sex, the bad language, the incomprehensibility\u00a0\u2026\u00a0The local newspaper printed an editorial about me: A soured introspective view of life\u00a0\u2026\u00a0And, A warped personality projected on\u00a0\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u2014<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/interviews\/1791\/the-art-of-fiction-no-137-alice-munro\">The Art of Fiction No. 137<\/a>, 1994<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Happy birthday to Alice Munro. In this 1979 clip from <em>Take 30<\/em>, a Canadian talk show, Munro\u2014who\u2019s eighty-two today\u2014discusses the less-than-warm reception her collection <em>Lives of Girls and Women <\/em>received in her native Huron County, where a conservative group argued that it should be expunged from\u00a0twelfth-grade syllabi. She speaks here to Harry Brown (whose three-piece suit yours truly wouldn\u2019t mind owning) about fighting the proposed ban.<\/p>\n<p>This is the kind of talk show that\u2019s all but extinct today, in which two unadorned, ordinary-looking people have an intelligent conversation without a studio audience, or a ticker scrolling beneath them, or a host of other distracting stimuli that have come to seem normal. But what\u2019s more eye-opening is how little has changed since then. The controversies stalking literature in 1979 are almost identical to today\u2019s bugbears: declining readership, increasing moral turpitude. A debate, in other words, about what literature should do and who it\u2019s for.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMany people don\u2019t read much and don\u2019t think books are very important anyway,\u201d Munro tells the interviewer. And:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>As far as I can tell from the talk of the people who are against the books, they somehow think that if we don\u2019t write about sex, it will disappear, it will go away. They talk about <em>preserving<\/em> their seventeen-year-old and eighteen-year-old children, protecting them. Well, biology doesn\u2019t protect them. They don\u2019t need to read books.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It\u2019s not clear whether Munro succeeded in stopping or overturning the ban, but apparently the events in Huron County \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/archives\/categories\/arts-entertainment\/literature\/the-lives-of-alice-munro\/alice-munro-challenges-censorship.html\" target=\"_blank\">inspired the Book and Periodical Council of Canada to launch Freedom to Read Week<\/a>, an annual celebration of freedom of expression.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>INTERVIEWER Was the community you grew up in pleased about your career? MUNRO It was known there had been stories published here and there, but my writing wasn\u2019t fancy. It didn\u2019t go over well in my hometown. The sex, the bad language, the incomprehensibility\u00a0\u2026\u00a0The local newspaper printed an editorial about me: A soured introspective view [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1539],"tags":[14569,262,7068,9158,1432,2968,14567,1132,14570,14568,7214],"class_list":["post-73795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video-multimedia","tag-14569","tag-alice-munro","tag-banned-books","tag-birthdays","tag-canada","tag-censorship","tag-huron-county","tag-interviews","tag-lives-and-women","tag-talk-shows","tag-videos"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Alice Munro on Censorship<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Watch Alice Munro discuss the less-than-warm reception her collection \u201cLives and Women\u201d received in her native Huron County.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Real Talk by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 10, 2014 \u2013 INTERVIEWER Was the community you grew up in pleased about your career? MUNRO It was known there had been stories published here and there, but my writing\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-07-10T22:23:26+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-07-11T02:17:19+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-1.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"675\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\"},\"headline\":\"Real Talk\",\"datePublished\":\"2014-07-10T22:23:26+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-07-11T02:17:19+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/\"},\"wordCount\":352,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"keywords\":[\"1979\",\"Alice Munro\",\"banned books\",\"birthdays\",\"Canada\",\"censorship\",\"Huron County\",\"interviews\",\"Lives and Women\",\"talk shows\",\"videos\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Video &amp; Multimedia\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/\",\"name\":\"Alice Munro on Censorship\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2014-07-10T22:23:26+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-07-11T02:17:19+00:00\",\"description\":\"Watch Alice Munro discuss the less-than-warm reception her collection \u201cLives and Women\u201d received in her native Huron County.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/real-talk\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Real Talk\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. 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